Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 23

In the same instant, Nick looked up and saw her. A girl with dark red hair cut short around a thinner, paler face than he remembered. The blue-green eyes were the same, watching him, unstartled.

Nick put down his watering-can and half-straightened, on the point of greeting her like a friend. As he moved, one of the greenfinches fluttered noisily from the fronds of the tallest palm and began to peck at the scatter of crumbs that he brought in every day for them. No one but the gardeners ever came to the orangery, and he had welcomed the birds’ company. Now the sound reminded him of where he was. He turned the warm flash of recognition into a distant nod, and stooped to his work once more. Amy went to him, brushing the glossy leaves aside impatiently. She stood beside him, forcing him by her closeness to look up and acknowledge her again.

‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

He remembered her. He remembered her with perfect clarity from the soft silence of her house in Bruton Street, and since he had come to Chance he had glimpsed her again, even watching for her with a kind of perverse fascination. He had seen her walking slowly on the terraces with her father, and once riding a big brown horse, her hair in a net under her peaked cap. He had seen her last Christmas, when he had brought a barrowload of red-berried holly up to decorate the hall for the servants’ party. She had been kneeling under the half-dressed tree, holding up a silver star. The last time had been on Boxing Day, standing in the middle of a knot of wheeling horses whose breath clouded the air. A man in white breeches with a top hat shading his handsome face had leaned down from his saddle to kiss her on the mouth. Nick had turned sharply away into the emptiness of his Christmas holiday.

‘You look different,’ he said defensively.

‘I look better than I did.’ Suddenly she was grinning at him. ‘I’ve been ill. I’ve been sent home to recuperate. I don’t quite know what to do with myself, actually.’

After the surprise of seeing her Nick was in possession of himself again. He was standing politely waiting for her to finish, the picture of a deferential servant. Amy heard as clearly as if he had said it aloud his ironic Will that be all, ma’am? She felt a slow, red flush spreading over her cheeks. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, to cover herself.

‘Working.’

The single word held all the weight of difference between them. The work he had needed so desperately, and she had held in the palm of her hand. The need to go on at it, whatever came, while Amy rested and recovered. The difference, again.

‘Do you like it here?’ she asked. She sounded like Royalty visiting a hospital, she thought, or her mother gracing a local church fête.

‘I like the flowers.’

Amy turned round in surprise. Nick was bending over the cream and gold petals of the orchid again, his thumb just touching the bloom of the inner lip.

‘What’s that one?’ she asked, clinging to the hope of a safe topic.

‘Don’t you know?’ His dark eyebrows went up, mocking her. ‘It’s the Brazilian orchid, Epidendrum fragrans.’

‘My great-grandfather was the only plantsman in the family. He brought all these things back from his travels.’ Amy gestured around at the moist greenery, the aerial roots that curled and looped and the heavy-scented, florid blooms. She was conscious of the hothouse heat under her hairline and the dampness gathering in the small of her back and at the cuffs of her dress. She saw that there was a faint sheen of sweat in the hollow of Nick’s throat where the dark hair showed at his open collar. He saw her looking.

‘I’m very sorry.’ The stiffness momentarily dispelled by the orchids’ beauty was back again. ‘Mr Dawe doesn’t permit the gardeners near the house without collars and ties. But no one ever comes in here.’

Mr Dawe was the ancient, formally trained head gardener. He regarded every flower cut from his beds and borders as a sacrifice. Amy smiled faintly at the thought of him.

‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ she said, ‘I’m a nurse now, you know.’ She had meant to imply that she was a matter-of-fact, hard-working person herself, but it had come out instead sounding as if the sight of a man’s bare chest was a familiar one. Amy felt the colour deepening in her already flushed face. Nick Penry was standing watching her, his respectful attitude only a veneer over the challenging mockery. Amy remembered the anger he had stirred in her on the day of the hunger march, and she swallowed it down again, determined to be friendly. He could laugh at her if he pleased, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that she minded.

‘Do you know a lot about flowers?’

‘I didn’t, until I came here. Not much grows, down the pits,’ he said drily. ‘When I came here, they started me off in the gardens as a handyman. Digging, forking manure, that kind of thing. Easy work, but not exactly interesting. Then, not long afterwards, one of the lads went off sick and they pulled me in to work in the cold houses. It was fascinating, seeing all the cuttings standing up in those little pots as if they would wither and die for sure, and then coming back and seeing that they’d taken, with all the white roots curled in the pot like threads. Mr Dawe said I had a talent for it, and kept me there. Then a couple of months ago he put me in charge of this place.’ Nick glanced up at the curve and swell of glass roof rising to the central ridge. ‘I’m going to put the blinds down on the sunny side,’ he said.

On the house wall a system of metal rods was connected to a polished brass handle. Nick began to wind it round and with grudging squeaks of wire against metal faded rolls of green canvas unfurled against the glass. When one side of the ogee roof was covered, a mysterious green shade fell across the jungle of plants and dimmed the strident blossoms. Amy felt the coolness fall across her face and looked up gratefully. The orangery felt like a rain forest instead of a tropical island.

Nick had gone back to his flowers. She was afraid, from his absorbed expression, that the moment of confidence was over. But after a moment he began to talk again, almost to himself.

‘I like the orchids best. Look at this one.’ He reached out to touch a dark pink flower with a soft lip that turned downwards and out like a woman’s mouth. ‘Did you ever see anything so lovely? So uselessly and extravagantly beautiful?’

In the dim, scented heat Amy felt a little shiver puckering her skin. If you come from Nantlas, she thought, seeing in her mind’s eye the grey stone and black dust and the cold curtains of rain, then the flamboyance of orchids would strike your eyes like a torch in the darkness. She thought they were sinister. Her own preference was for the flowers of the cottage gardens, the grey and blue of lavender and the spikes of lupins, and the innocence of daisies and sweet peas.

‘I started reading about them. There are the records in the estates office. I went into town, to the public library. But there are only two books on orchids there, neither of them much good.’

Amy remembered that behind the metal-latticed doors of the Chance library there was almost a whole wall of botany books. ‘I think there must be some of my great-grandfather’s in the library here,’ she said. ‘I could look them out for you.’

Nick picked up his watering-can again. ‘That would be very kind,’ he said.

Don’t, Amy wanted to beg him. Don’t make me be Lady Bountiful. It doesn’t have to be like that.

‘How is your son?’ she asked.

‘Well enough, thank you. He had a kind of blood disease and we were badly worried. But he’s getting treatment and he’s almost back to normal now. He won’t ever be right, because of what happened when he was born. But it seemed hard that he should have to suffer even more than that.’

Amy thought of the Lambeth, and some of the things she had seen in the children’s long-stay wards. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

Nick was working, apparently eager to be alone again with his flowers. Amy only knew that she wanted to go on talking to him.

‘And your wife?’ she persisted. ‘Don’t they miss you at home?’

He jerked round so that he stood squarely in front of her. His height was suddenly threatening, with no trace of a submissive stoop left now.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he snapped. The odd greeny-grey of his eyes was hard and opaque.

‘I …’

‘My wife is well. They are both fed, thanks to you, by what I send back from here. Is that what you want, for me to say thank you? Why don’t you come right out and ask me? “I’d like you to show some gratitude, Mr Penry.” Well then, thank you. My son’s alive, my wife’s got food and clothes and a fire in the grate. All thanks to you, Miss Lovell. Will there be anything else, miss?’

Amy stepped back as if he had struck her. The air suddenly felt leaden, as if a thunderstorm quivered overhead.

‘Why do you hate me so much?’ she asked.

Nick stood for a long moment without moving, and then let the watering-can drop sharply so that the metal clanged on the marble floor.

‘Ach.’ There was despair as well as disgust in the guttural little sound. ‘I don’t hate you. I don’t care enough. It doesn’t matter, either way.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Amy said hotly. ‘Not about me, but you do care. You care about things, all right. That’s what’s the matter with you.’

Then she turned and walked away, slowly and with measured steps, denying him the satisfaction of seeing her run.

The heavy, carved doors closed firmly on the rampant jungle and Nick was left alone with the finches.

He stood in the same position, staring ahead of him. When a whirr of green wings brought another of the birds down to his crumbs, Nick wearily lifted his hand and rubbed his face.

Aloud, he said something in Welsh. Mae’n ddrwg geni. I’m sorry. And then, bending to his work again, ‘The Honourable Amalia Lovell, wasn’t it? But my friends call me Amy. I expect you’ve got plenty of those. You don’t need another.’

Amy went back along the silent corridor, faster now that he couldn’t see her, almost running until she reached her room. The nurse who had come to look after her was smoothing the white cover on the bed.

‘Miss Lovell? Are you all right? Here, sit down.’

Amy shook her head. ‘I’m just breathless. I walked too fast up the stairs. There’s no need to stay. I’ll just sit quietly for a while.’

At last, the woman went away and left her alone. Amy sat down on the seat in the deep window embrasure. The glass was cool to lean her burning face against. Beneath her the mown grass of the park rolled away to the huge cedar tree, and almost in the shade of it a man was working, raking up the folded swathes of cut grass into neat piles.

Abruptly, she turned away from the sight.

The morning’s papers and a new glossy magazine were laid out on her table. Tony Hardy had sent her a package of new novels when she was ill, and the coloured spines glowed invitingly. Amy picked one out and flipped through the pages. Nothing was right. Nick Penry’s opaque eyes stared out insultingly.

Amy stood up again. She would go and find Gerald. Since she had been at home a kind of easy companionship had developed between them. She had begun to suspect that he even enjoyed having her with him. She would look for her father. Perhaps he would come and walk with her, or ride up over the ridge and gallop down the other side into the cool wind.

*

Outside the offices of Randle & Cates at exactly one p.m. a taxicab drew up. A young man in a white linen jacket with a loosely knotted, pale pink tie sprang out, paid the driver and dashed up the steps.

Tony Hardy, watching from the window of his first-floor front office, drew back a little and frowned.

A moment later his secretary came in to announce the visitor. ‘Mr Lovell.’

Richard breezed in immediately. ‘Tony. Here I am. It looks divine, you know. I’m thrilled to death. Everyone will buy it, I’m quite certain.’

‘Everyone will talk about it. That isn’t quite the same as shelling out the necessary for a copy, I assure you.’

Tony picked up a book from a little pile of identical volumes stacked neatly on his desk. The jacket was plain pale grey, and the tide stared out in bold black type. The Innocent and the Damned. Beneath, in smaller letters, it proclaimed itself Nearly a Novel, by Richard Lovell.

Richard came to stand beside Tony, admiring the effect at arm’s length.

‘So un-innocent looking. It could so easily have looked like a cheap romance, don’t you think? And I think we were so right not to go for some fussy picture that would have lessened the impact.’

Tony sighed. ‘I’m not worried about the impact it will have.’

Richard rounded on him at once. ‘What’s the matter? Losing your nerve?’

‘Not on our behalf. It won’t be the first risk I’ve taken, nor the first succès de scandale we’ll have suffered. I was thinking more about the effect on you, as it happens.’

Richard laughed delightedly. ‘My dear, just look at me. Do I look too fragile to cope with a brickbat or two?’

Tony did look. Richard Lovell had grown from the detached, clever little boy he had tutored into an even less knowable adult. And Tony thought that he probably knew him as well as anyone else in the world, outside his family. Richard had cultivated his flair for the ridiculous to the point where he was an invariably amusing companion, the expected life and soul of any of the unconventional gatherings he chose to frequent. He was determinedly cheerful, and seemed dedicated only to enjoying himself. In that respect he was like his mother. But Tony knew that behind his half-closed eyes Richard hid a much more complex nature. He was adept at disguising himself. Even his age was difficult to guess at. With his cultivatedly weary, cynical or occasionally puckish manner Richard, at nineteen, might have been taken for anything between twenty and thirty.

And now there was his extraordinary, risky, pyrotechnic novel. Thousands of copies of it, delivered this morning to the Randle & Cates warehouse from the carefully indemnified printers.

‘Well?’ Richard prompted. ‘Do I?’

‘No,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t think you’re too fragile to cope with whatever they fling at you. What about your family?’

‘Amy already knows that I have written a novel. I don’t think, given what she knows about you and me, that she will be shocked into insensibility. Adeline loves me to the point of idolatry and would continue to do so even if she heard I was a mass-murderer. I don’t think poor Bel is in a position to care.’

The omission was all too clear.

‘And Lord Lovell?’

Unusually for Richard there were two or three seconds of silence before he answered. And then his voice was measured, without the light sparkle of flippancy. ‘I hate everything that my father stands for. I don’t hate him, although I easily could. I can’t take any responsibility for what Gerald might feel.’

Tony replaced the new book on the pile.

‘And the other risks?’

Richard was growing impatient. ‘It’s rather late, isn’t it, to be beating our breasts about all this? If you mean the gendarmes, I don’t intend to hang about for long enough to be clapped in the cells. And I’m still a minor, remember, and so the innocent party. Your own lawyers have assured us that I have been as discreet as fiction demands about the less innocent. Enough.’

Tony was putting on his tweed jacket that had been hanging on the back of his office chair, and glanced at Richard’s turnout as he did so.

‘You don’t exactly dress discreetly.’

‘Oh dear.’ Richard fluffed out his pink tie. ‘I am in the kennel today. And I thought we were supposed to be celebrating. I shall pretty myself up as much as I please. It’s one of life’s least damaging pleasures, and one that you, in those frightful tweeds, clearly don’t take enough account of. Tony, you know that you are my dearest friend, and I am grateful unto death for what you’re doing. But just sometimes you can be just a little too much the old maid. Now, let’s go and have this famous publisher’s lunch. I’ve struck everything else out of the diary for the rest of the day.’

‘God help us,’ Tony murmured, as they went down the stairs together.

In the restaurant Richard ordered champagne ‘to begin with’. He watched the waiter pouring it and then leant back, stroking the side of his glass.

‘Are the review copies out?’

‘Of course. Two hundred of them. I’ve tried to make sure that enough have gone to people likely to be sympathetic.’

‘The old queers’ network? I don’t want sympathy.’

‘Don’t be a fool. You want good reviews.’

‘And the bookshops?’

‘Are taking copies in cautious quantities. Waiting for publication and the reviewers’ reactions.’

Richard lifted his glass. ‘One more thing. You’ve never really admitted it. Is it a good book?’

Tony smiled and picked up his own glass. ‘It’s a brilliant book. It’ll probably land us both in gaol, even so.’

‘Thank you. Here’s to publication day, then.’

‘To next week,’ Tony said, and they drank together.

Gerald was reading the newspaper on the shady side of the long terrace at Chance. His leg was propped stiffly on a footstool in front of him. Amy sat down close to him on the stone balustrade, feeling the warmth of the pitted stone under her fingers and the tiny, crumbly yellow lichens.

‘Is your leg bad today?’ she asked.

Gerald rustled his paper. ‘The same.’ He was curt in discussing what he regarded as physical weaknesses.

Amy tried again. ‘Is it well enough for us to have a walk together after lunch?’

He put the newspaper down and folded it up with an air of patience in the face of constant interruption. ‘A walk? A walk to where?’

‘Just across the park. Over the ridge, if you felt like it.’

‘Felled a lot of oaks, over the other side. Sign of the times.’ Gerald sighed gloomily and took his watch suspended on a gold chain out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘Time for luncheon. I’ll see how much I’ve got to do afterwards.’ But when he had heaved himself upright he offered his arm companionably to Amy and they strolled back into the house together.

The route to the dining room took them through the long, brown-leather and faded gilt expanse of the library. Amy glanced up at the heights of shelving and the thousands of books in their locked cases.

‘Papa, where are the botany books? The ones Great-grandfather collected? I remember we used to look at the paintings of orchids when we were children.’

‘End bay, on the right, I believe. Why do you ask?’

She thought quickly, and decided on the truth. ‘One of the gardeners is working in the orangery, and wanted to read some more about the plants. The orchids, in particular. I thought they might help him.’

‘Don’t go lending the books to the damned gardeners. They can’t read, half of them, anyway.’

‘Oh, this one can,’ Amy said.

After his lunch Gerald demanded abruptly, ‘What are you sitting about for? Let’s have this walk, if we’re going.’

He took his stick, but he made a point of only using it to swish at the grass as they walked. Amy was quickly out of breath, and so their slow pace was perfectly matched. In the sunshine they climbed the gently rising parkland to the crest of the ridge. When they reached it Amy and her father stood still, arm in arm. On one side of them was the dappled green patchwork of woodland, and on the other the grassy slope dipped down to the great grey house set amongst its terraces and flowers. In the distance was the sweep of high wall that enclosed the park, and the domestic huddle of houses at the village gates. The sky was a perfect, impervious blue, and under it the countless shades of green and gold shimmered in the haze of heat.

Amy blinked at the tears in her eyes, and then they came rolling down her cheeks. Since her illness she had cried easily, sometimes inexplicably. But today it came with the unexpected wave of love for the acres of Chance, pulling inside her like a bowstring.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, turning her face away from her father.

‘As beautiful as any woman,’ he echoed her. ‘It’s all here for you children. The three of you.’

And there it will end, Amy thought, with a moment of clairvoyant certainty. She almost stumbled as Gerald turned them away from the ridged back of the hill and down the slope again.

‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘Tell me. What’re you going to do with yourself, when this little illness is all behind you?’

‘Go back to nursing. That’s what I am, now. A nurse. State Registered,’ she added lightly.

Gerald gave his characteristic snort. ‘I don’t understand you damned children,’ he complained. ‘But I suppose this nursing idiocy is better than marrying some fool or other.’

Breathlessly Amy groped for the words that would let them begin to talk about Isabel, even about Richard. But awkwardness and apprehension drove all the possibilities out of her head. They never would talk, she realized. It was too many years too late. If only Gerald could have talked to his children, to his wife, even, Amy thought sadly, how different everything might be.

‘I don’t think I’m going to marry anyone,’ she told him honestly.

‘Delighted to hear it. Now then, I want to go down and see Mackintosh in the office.’

‘I’ll walk down there with you.’

They crossed the park in a long diagonal, and came to the estates office at the gates. Mr Mackintosh, a sandy-eyebrowed Scot, was working at his desk. Amy sat outside in the sun while Gerald despatched his business and then, when he limped off to see another of his staff, Amy slipped in to see the estate manager. He bobbed up from behind his desk at once.

‘Good morning, Miss Amy. It’s grand to see you well again. We heard you were very bad at one time.’

‘Thank you, Mr Mackintosh. I’m quite all right again now. Tell me – Mr Penry, one of the gardeners. I met him working with the orchids, and he seemed so interested in them that I offered to lend him some books from the library. Where shall I take them?’

‘That’s really very good of you, Miss Amy. Penry shouldn’t be troubling you. If you would like me to come up to the house for the books, I’ll see he gets them. And takes care of them,’ Mr Mackintosh added.

‘It’s no trouble. It was my suggestion to him,’ Amy said pleasantly. ‘I’m sure I’ll bump into him again in the orangery.’ She turned away, and then as an afterthought she asked, ‘Where is Mr Penry living?’

The sandy eyebrows went up by the merest fraction. ‘In the empty keeper’s cottage up on the north side.’

‘All the way over there?’

Amy knew the tiny cottage. It wasn’t easy to settle any of the estate families in it because of its isolation.

‘Penry seems to prefer it,’ Mr Mackintosh said with a touch of grimness. Amy gathered that Nick wasn’t exactly his favourite amongst the men, and smothered a little smile at the thought of them confronting each other.

‘Thank you, Mr Mackintosh.’

‘Thank you, Miss Amy. You’ll find his lordship on the stable side with the farrier.’ As she walked out again into the late-June warmth, Amy knew what she would do.

It took her most of the evening in the library to find the books she wanted. The botany collection belonging to the fifteenth Lord Lovell had hardly been touched for decades. Amy found the brown-leather Victorian volumes dealing with orchids, with the minutely detailed, almost erotic paintings of columns and labellae, bulbils and fleshy aerial roots that had vaguely disturbed her as a child. But something else tugged at her memory, and she went on searching.

It was late when she made her discovery, standing on the highest level of the mahogany library steps. The big, square books, bound in calf, were tucked in at one end of the highest shelf, almost hidden by the frame of the case. Amy took them out, three of them, and blew the dust away. Then she carried them to one of the big tables and laid them carefully in the light of a lamp.

Inside the flyleaf of the first, in a vigorous script that time had faded to faint sepia, was written ‘The journal of my travels through South America. George Lovell, 1854-1856’.

Turning the pages, Amy began to read the matter-of-fact accounts of plant-hunting expeditions into tropical rain forests, or up the inhospitable rock faces of unclimbed mountain peaks. Her great-grandfather had clearly been a dedicated and stoical traveller. On one page she read with horrified fascination how one of his native bearers had accidentally shot himself in the thigh with a pistol, and how George had performed the operation to remove the bullet himself, with only the first-aid kit to help him. A little further on came the description of how a troublesome wound in his lordship’s own leg was refusing to heal and how he ‘feared that gangrene might develop and so hold up progress entirely’.

The unemotional account of his self-cauterization with only brandy to dull the pain made even Amy shudder.

But the adventures and obstacles were only incidental to the real purpose of the expeditions, the discovery and categorization of rare plants. The appearance and habitat of every one was minutely described, and the pages were full of long botanical names and tiny, immaculate sketches of leaves, petals and stamens. A regular entry was N.S. for new species, or with occasional uncharacteristic tentativeness, ?N. S.

Amy read on, intrigued by her relative’s obsession.

The big, domed clock on the library wall told her that it was nearly one in the morning when she closed the last book.

Tomorrow she would take them to show to Nick. She knew that the stories of how the orchids had been found and brought home to the orangery would fascinate him.

It would be a peace offering.

The next afternoon Amy went riding with Gerald. They hacked slowly over to his nearest neighbours’ damp manor house where they had tea and fruit cake on the lawn and deplored the state of the country, and then rode back again. Gerald was a fine horseman in spite of his leg, and considered the round trip of ten miles hardly a ride at all. Amy was relieved to discover when they reached Chance again that she was barely tired. She was recovering rapidly.

They ate an early dinner in companionable silence while Gerald peered at a bloodstock magazine, and then he went off to his rooms and left her alone. Amy put on her jacket, then searched for and found a basket big enough to carry the explorer’s journals. She went out of the terrace doors, down the steps to the lawn, and set off towards the north side of the estate.

It was dusk, and the blue-grey light seemed almost thick enough to touch. As she silently crossed the grass, she saw the occasional glimmer of a moth’s wings, and once the black swoop of a bat against the sky. She caught the scent of honeysuckle from the gardens, and the succulent richness of damp earth.

It was more than a mile to the keeper’s cottage and Amy walked slowly, shifting the heavy basket from arm to arm and enjoying the stillness. At last she saw ahead of her the dense black line where the woodland encroached on the park and a tiny square of yellow light standing out against it.

For the last hundred yards she walked even more slowly, listening to the faint squeaks her flat shoes made in the wet grass, and the distant burr of a car on the lane beyond the woods.

The cottage window was uncurtained, and she stopped on the doorstep with her hand raised to knock. Nick was sitting at the wooden table, reading by the yellow glow of a paraffin lamp. Amy had just time enough to see the sadness in his intent face before he sensed her eyes on him. His head jerked up just as she rapped on the door.

‘Come in.’ Nick’s Welsh voice, firm and unstartled.

Amy pushed the low door open and stepped inside. A moth fluttered around her head and was drawn at once to the glass mantle of the lamp.

Amy stood on the stone-flagged floor and looked at the bare lime-washed walls, and unlit black range and the tiny steep staircase that corkscrewed up to the single room overhead.

How lonely it must be here.

How long had Nick lived in this little house, a mile from anyone, more than a hundred miles from Nantlas? A year. Over a year. I’ve never thought, Amy reproached herself.

Nick was looking steadily at her, one eyebrow raised a fraction. ‘This is an honour,’ he said. ‘So far, so late at night.’ Amy wasn’t certain, but she thought she saw the flicker of a smile. ‘And alone? Or did you get one of the grooms to bring you over?’

Amy put her basket on the table. The room was so small she only had to stretch her arm out to it from the doorway.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s begin like this again. Can’t you see me just as a person? Just as Amy, and nothing to do with Chance or any of the rest of it?’

There was a small moment of silence. ‘I’ll try,’ Nick said, and now his mouth did twist up into a smile. ‘What’s in the basket?’

‘A peace offering. Can we call a truce?’

He laughed now. ‘If you like.’

Amy lifted the books out one by one. ‘My great-grandfather’s journals. The history of your orchids.’

He reached out and took them, laying them on the table under the lamplight just as Amy had done the night before. He began to turn the pages, glancing at them and then leaning forward with his head bent, absorbed. Amy stood quietly in the doorway watching him, and then she saw that he had forgotten her. She looked around the room. The beams were so low that Nick must have to stoop under them. The only furniture was the table and chair, and a black oak settle at right angles to the range. On the table beside an empty plate was a pile of books, and a scatter of papers, letters and pamphlets. Amongst them Amy recognized the familiar style of pronouncements from Appleyard Street. Clearly Nick was still politically active, for all his isolation at Chance.

Amy crossed the room behind his chair and sat down on the settle, drawing her knees up beneath her chin to make herself comfortable on the narrow seat.

Nick was smiling as he read.

‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘The one you were asking about.’ He hadn’t forgotten her, then. ‘The Brazilian orchid. “A fine specimen. Placed it in the peat bag with the greatest of care and entrusted it to the boy to carry back to the camp. There being an hour before dusk, I went on up the ravine, but found nothing of note. May 17, 1855.”’ He touched the two unopened books as if gauging the mass of information that they contained. ‘Thank you for bringing them,’ he said simply. ‘I shall enjoy reading it all.’ This time he was smiling at her, and the warmth dissolved the harsh lines in his face.

Amy was conscious of the yellowness of the lamplight and the shadows on the bare walls, the park stretching silent and moist beyond them, a moment of waiting, as if for something inevitable. She looked around her again, at the tiny room with the fluttering moths and Nick at his table, his hands resting on the old journals.

‘Who did you say he was?’ Nick asked, and she jumped.

‘Who? Oh, my father’s grandfather.’

‘I like the sound of your father’s grandfather. He must have been quite an adventurer. What happened to him in the end?’

‘He died safely in his bed here at Chance, as far as I know. At least, he’s buried in the church along with everyone else. Except for my brother Airlie, who died on the Somme.’

‘Mine too,’ Nick said. ‘I thought I’d be a pacifist after that. I’m not so sure, now.’ There was another moment of silence. One of the moths drawn to the lamp found the top of the mantle, settled for an instant and then plunged. There was the faintest sizzle as the papery wings burned.

Amy thought of Airlie, and of Nick’s brother, and then of her own time vanishing as irrevocably as the moth’s. She was possessed by a sense of loss and transience, and by the certainty that if she didn’t reach out and hold it something vital would be gone too.

Then she looked up and saw Nick watching her, and she thought that she knew his face better than anything else in the world.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked softly.

‘To bring you the journals. As a peace offering.’

Nick stood up and came over to the settle. ‘Why did you really come?’

He was forcing her to answer, uncompromising, but Amy saw the flicker in his face that betrayed him. So Nick was vulnerable, and needy, too. Suddenly, the precious something she had been afraid to lose was there, within her grasp. The closeness and importance of it made her heart knock in her chest.

‘I came because I wanted to see you.’ She shouldn’t look away, covering herself. Amy met his eyes. ‘I’m afraid of you, but I want to be with you.’

That was the truth. She didn’t understand yet, but she was certain that she wanted to be with him.

Nick stooped, and then knelt in front of the settle. He was very close. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. He took one of Amy’s hands, lying clenched in her lap, and held it. And then: ‘I’m afraid, too.’

Amy understood that he had stopped fencing with her. He was no longer taunting her with the distance that separated them, and he was admitting the question that had hovered between them since the night at Bruton Street.

Amy’s heart was hammering so that she was sure he must hear it. The breath caught in her chest and her mouth opened to draw in the air. She saw Nick’s high cheekbones and wry mouth, and the chameleon eyes suddenly clear under the black brows, and she knew that she was seeing Nick himself, unguarded.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispered.

Very slowly, he bent his head. His mouth brushed against hers as lightly as the moth’s wings.

‘Amy. My friends call me Amy,’ he murmured, and impatiently she turned her head a fraction so that their mouths met again. His hands came up to cup her face, tilting it to his, and then he kissed her.

Amy closed her eyes, and against the velvet blackness she saw the yellow halo of the paraffin lamp, bright and dim, image upon image, receding into the dark. Stillness folded around them, their own stillness, inviolable.

Nick.

His mouth opened against hers, wider, bruising her lips with its insistence. She tasted the quick movement of his tongue and answered it with her own.

Nick’s hand moved, down to the buttons of her thin jacket and then to the loose bodice of her dinner dress. His fingers found the fastening and opened it, and then his hand enclosed her breast. His palm moved gently against the nipple’s hardness.

Amy opened her eyes. He was looking at her with a kind of disbelief, urgent and tentative at the same time. His eyes went to the copper light in her hair, and the tilt of her head on her long neck, the pearls in the hollow of her throat and the swell of pale skin under his hand.

She saw how much he needed her. And just as quickly Nick drew down a veil somewhere. They were kneeling on the bare flagstones now, facing each other with their fingers interlaced, and he leaned back a little.

‘Is this what you came for?’ he asked her. ‘It’s been a long time. A very long time –’ she heard the huskiness in his voice – ‘but I can do this if it’s what you want.’

Taunting her, she thought, and testing her. Testing himself, and his power to resist as well.

If he would just ask her, Amy thought, she would gladly lie down there and then on the bare stones and give herself to him. And knowing that, she was past pride. If he thought she was voracious, well then, she would prove herself to be other things too.

‘Not just for this,’ she told him, struggling for the truth. ‘To be able to look at you and talk to you, as well. I told you, I wanted to be with you. I don’t understand what else, quite, yet. But yes, I wanted you to touch me. That’s the truth, Nick. Won’t you tell me the truth too? Don’t you want it too?’

She saw it flash in his face, and heard it in the harsh edge in his voice. ‘Oh yes,’ he whispered. ‘I want it. I want you. Ever since I saw you …’

‘Nick.’

The veil had dissolved again.

‘Nick, I’m here.’

Amy felt as if his kiss would swallow her up, and as if her answer to him would wash them both away. His height bent her backwards, and she felt the weight of his body over hers as his mouth moved to her throat, and then to her bare shoulders where the dress had slipped. The stone was cold under her thighs. His dark head dipped again and she saw how black it was against her own white skin, and then he kissed her breast, moving his tongue in a slow circle so that she quivered and felt Nick’s trembling answering her. She drew him closer and he rested his head against her, letting her cradle him in her arms like an infant. As they knelt in the sweet silence Nick looked across the room to the uncurtained window.

At once in her own head Amy saw the cottage as she had walked towards it from the park, a black shape against the dense woods with the little square of light picking it out. Picking them out, to the eyes of the night.

Let the eyes look, she told herself, but Nick lifted his head. Gently he slipped the soft stuff of her dress to cover her shoulders. He knelt back on his heels, watching her as if to imprint the sight of her inside his head. Then he reached out and touched her cheek, and with the palm of his hand, he smoothed her hair.

‘Why?’ Amy asked him.

‘Think,’ he said. She heard the sadness, and she wanted to reach out to him and kiss it away. But Nick picked up her jacket from where it had fallen and wrapped it around her.

‘I don’t care,’ Amy said. ‘None of it matters, out there. We can cover the window.’

And then there will be just us. Nick, I only want there to be us.

He smiled at her. ‘You’re very honest, Amy.’

He stood up and began to move around the little room, looking back at her as she knelt beside the hearth as if to convince himself that she was there.

‘I want you to think, first. Think about out there, of course, about your life and mine. But I really meant think about in here. About what would happen. If it does begin, you know, it won’t be easy to undo.’

He was warning her, holding off his own need for her benefit.

He was right, Amy knew that. There would be no undoing it. It was the thing that she had been afraid of losing, and the same thing that had seemed so easy to grasp, and so sweet when she had briefly tasted it. It was big now, so that it cast a shadow and hid everything else.

Amy stood up stiffly. She nodded, a quick jerk of her head.

‘All right,’ she promised him at last, in the certainty that there would be no avoiding what would happen, and even now no going back. ‘I will think. But I don’t need to. I know, already. I’ll come back. You’ll be here, won’t you?’

Nick was sitting in his place at the table once more, touching the cover of the journal with his fingertips.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said.

She looked quickly at him, afraid that he might have retreated into bitterness again. But he was simply stating what was true, and telling her that, yes, if she chose to come back he would be here.

Amy went to him and put her arms over his shoulders to touch his hands, resting her cheek against his hair. His arms tightened on hers, pulling her closer.

‘It wouldn’t be just me taking his lordship’s daughter to bed. It would be more than that, wouldn’t it? I wasn’t sure that I’d ever want that again. Knowing what it costs, in the end.’

To Amy he seemed almost to be talking to himself. She wasn’t afraid of whatever it was ahead of them, because she had no experience of it. But Nick did, and Nick was afraid.

‘Why don’t you go home, any more?’ she whispered against the black warmth of his hair.

‘Because we hurt each other. I stay here, and I send her the money every week for Dickon. Once in a while she writes to me to tell me how he is. That’s all.’ And then, so quietly that she had to strain to catch the words, he said, ‘Amy. Amy, is anything that might happen between us worth the risk of any more hurt? Putting everything else aside, that is?’

Amy thought. Everything else was Chance, and her father and Mr Mackintosh and the orangery, Nantlas and the pits and Mari and Dickon. Leaving herself and Nick. She turned her cheek against his head, closing her eyes. It would be impossible for her to walk out of the cottage now and leave him, and whatever it was he held in his hands for both of them.

‘Yes,’ Amy said fiercely. ‘Yes. I know it’s worth the risk.’

Nick stood up abruptly, turned to face her and pulled her against him. He looked down at the dark patches illness had left under her eyes, and at the hollows in her cheeks. His fingers clenched in her hair but he was gentle as he kissed her. For an instant, so that she was almost giddy with it, she felt the hard line of him against her. Then, just as gently, he let her go again.

Moving like a sleepwalker, Amy crossed the stone flags to the low doorway. She opened the door on to the blackness and the damp fragrance of the night air filled the room.

‘Have you been lonely here?’ she asked.

Nick smiled slightly. ‘I’ve been as lonely as you have,’ he answered.

Amy was briefly startled, and then she knew that he was right. For years she had been lonely, and tonight she wasn’t lonely any longer.

‘Would you like me to walk with you back to the house?’ he asked formally.

Amy grinned her happiness at him. ‘Nothing can happen to me at Chance. I’m perfectly safe.’

‘I wonder if your father would agree with that, after tonight?’

Amy’s smile was brilliant. ‘I’m twenty-one years old, I don’t need my father’s safe-keeping any more. Good night, Nick. Think of me.’

Nick was standing beside his paraffin lamp, the shadows it cast black across his face. ‘I will.’ She had already turned away when he called after her. She heard the crackle in his voice. ‘You think,’ he ordered.

‘Yes.’

Then she was gone, closing the door behind her with a soft click of the latch. Nick went back to his chair, looking down at the books she had brought for him. ‘Thank you for the orchid journals,’ he murmured. Against the dull brown covers, watching him, he saw Amy’s vivid face with her eyes as bright as stars.

Outside in the darkness Amy was running. Exhilaration bubbled up inside her like a spring and carried her towards where the lights of the big house sailed like a liner across the park.

The house was silent when she reached it, but as she passed the library door, the telephone began to ring. Knowing that her father would already be asleep, she went in and picked up the receiver. ‘Chance,’ she said automatically.

‘Amy, my darling love, this is your erring brother.’

‘Richard?’ He sounded drunk, and triumphant, with an edge of apprehension that reminded her of when he had misbehaved as a small boy.

‘The same.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At Bruton Street, at this very moment. Dear old Glass keeps the door so well against the vulgar columnists that it seems the sensible spot. And Mama is being a perfect archangel, too. Shocked to the core, of course, but just a tiny bit proud as well.’

‘Richard, what are you talking about? You’re tight, aren’t you?’

‘Fractionally. Oh dear, this conversation has come out completely back to front. I’m telephoning to say that the balloon has gone up, and all that. Keep your dear head down, and watch out for the old man.’

‘What?’

‘It’s my novel, dearest. Just out this week, and I have to say attracting attention from every quarter. Respectable literary notices, but some thoroughly prurient bits of gossip as well, and seedy-looking fellows hanging round the back door reading the laundry lists. The news hasn’t penetrated to the rural depths of Chance yet, then?’

Amy frowned as she tried to take in what Richard was saying. He had talked about a novel, of course. She even knew that he had finished writing it. But she had never taken seriously the idea of its publication. Clearly that had been a mistake, Amy thought with a touch of grimness. Knowing her brother as well as she did, it was hard to believe that his novel would be particularly good news for the family.

‘What’s it about?’ she asked cautiously.

‘About me, of course.’

Amy closed her eyes, wondering if there was any way that the whole thing could be kept from Gerald. There wasn’t, of course. He would hear about it in the end.

‘I’ll send a copy down for you to read, Amy. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.’

‘I know what I think already,’ she snapped. ‘Couldn’t you have found a rather less cruel way of telling him?’

To do Richard justice, there was a moment or two of awkward silence before he answered, a shade too brightly, ‘No, I don’t think so. Did you really expect me to pop down to Chance and confront him over a game of billiards? “My cue, I think, Papa. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you know that I’m queer? No? Well, there it is. Nothing to be done about it, I’m afraid. Oh I say, good shot.” Do you think that’s how it should have been?’

Amy sighed. Clearly there was no use in trying to find out any more from him now.

‘I’d go to bed, if I were you, Richard. I’m coming up to town in the morning and I’ll see you then. Don’t say anything to Papa yet, will you? Has there been anything in The Times?’

‘No. Literary mags and scandal sheets.’

‘He’s not likely to see any of those, thank God. Until tomorrow, then, damn you.’

‘Looking forward to it.’

‘Good night,’ Amy said coolly. And damn Tony Hardy as well, she thought, as she hung up.

Amy went slowly up the stairs to her room. The curtains were tightly drawn, her bed had been turned down and her night things laid out for her. On the table beside her bed the nurse had left her dose of tonic, and her sleeping draught already mixed. Amy picked up the little glass of cloudy liquid and looked at it, then poured it away. Sleep was irrelevant tonight. She didn’t want to fall asleep and lose the thread of closeness that linked her to Nick across the silent park. She sat down in her armchair and leant back with her eyes closed. At once he was there, with his head bent in the lamplight, and then with his face so close to hers that she saw the muscles move at the corner of his mouth.

If Richard chose to make his life into a matter for public gossip, then that was Richard’s own business. She would do what she could when the time came to soften it for Gerald, but she couldn’t change the truth. The anxiety for them both was real but it was pale tonight beside the brilliance of what she had discovered. She felt as exhilarated as if she were drunk herself.

‘Nick,’ she said softly.

She had to do what she had promised, and think about what loving him would mean. She could do that as easily in Bruton Street as here. More easily, perhaps, without the constant hope of seeing him in the garden or the orangery.

And then she would come back to him. She was as certain of that as if she had already done it, and the thought of it filled her with soft, quiet happiness.

Amy smiled. She was still smiling when, curled up on the bed in all her clothes, she fell dreamlessly asleep.

When she arrived the next day, the house in Bruton Street looked perfectly normal. Even if she had only half-expected to see a rabble of gossip columnists besieging the door, it was a relief to find that there wasn’t one. Glass was his usual impassive self as he ushered her inside.

Amy went up to Adeline’s white drawing room. Her mother, in a perfectly draped Mainbocher dress, was sitting on a sofa reading a magazine.

‘Darling!’ she exclaimed. ‘The drama, you would scarcely believe. Richard is so wicked. I guessed, no, I knew, of course, not that it matters nowadays except for the sake of the inheritance. But to put it all in a book, Amy, for everyone to read …’

And there, on the table beside her, was Richard’s novel.

‘Where is he?’ Amy asked, picking it up.

‘Lunching somewhere. The attention is turning his head. He does nothing except go out, come home to change into even more flamboyant clothes, and go out again.’

Amy could almost have smiled. There was the faintest note of pique in Adeline’s voice. Her description of Richard’s day was exactly the kind of programme she enjoyed most herself.

Adeline held out a white folder. ‘And here are the press cuttings and reviews. The things people have said …’

Amy waved the folder away. ‘I think I’ll just read the book itself, first.’

‘Do. And to think I was so approving of that Mr Hardy of yours, Amy. This is all his fault.’

‘He’s not mine, Mama. And it’s Richard’s fault. Tony Hardy’s a publisher and a businessman, and he will do whatever his acumen suggests. I’ll go down and read it in the library.’

‘Some of the reviews are really very good,’ Adeline called after her. ‘He’s a talented writer, you know.’

Adeline wasn’t angry, Amy thought, as she went back downstairs. She adored Richard, and from childhood he had been her favourite. Nothing he could do, however injudicious, would ever change that.

The green shades in the library were drawn against the hot sunshine. The room was cool, and smelt faintly of dust and leather. Amy sat down at the wide desk. Just for a moment, she closed her eyes and thought of Nick. He might have sat in this chair to scrawl the note he had left for her after the night of the hunger march. Do some more kissing, he had written. You might get to like it.

I do, Amy thought, smiling.

Then she remembered what she was sitting in the library for. With a faint sigh she opened Richard’s novel and began to read.

The Innocent and the Damned was short. Amy read it all, sitting in the quiet room, without looking up once. Then, when she had finished, she closed the sombre grey covers and sat quite still, staring unseeingly ahead.

It was all perfectly recognizable, yet painfully distorted because it was seen through Richard’s eyes.

‘Queer’s vision,’ she heard him say. They were all in it: the beautiful and sociable mother and the pretty sisters with their escorts. And the father, savagely drawn, cruel to the boy and remote from the man. Richard’s innocent moved in a world they all knew. It was a world of the Fourth of June, the Eton and Harrow match, Henley Regatta and country house parties and tennis. And then, as the innocence was eroded, another, parallel world emerged. It was a black world of corruption and degradation, pursued in the alleyways of Soho and the tattered streets of the East End. The knowing young man pushed deeper and deeper into it in search of what he wanted, and needed. The end came abruptly. No longer innocent, he was stabbed to death by his lover of that night in a deserted bar.

That was Richard’s metaphor for the progress of life. Light into dark, innocence into depravity, unstoppable. The bleakness of the vision frightened Amy. Was that what Richard thought, behind his smile and his flow of banter?

His book was sad, and also funny in macabre, characteristic bursts. It was brave, and a considerable achievement. And Amy thought that reading it would break her father’s heart.

The telephone rang on the desk beside her, startling her. She realized that she had been sitting in the same position for hours, and she was stiff from head to foot.

‘May I speak to Mr Lovell?’ an unrecognizable voice asked.

‘I’m afraid not. He’s out at lunch.’

‘Am I speaking to Lady Lovell?’

‘No. I’m Mr Lovell’s sister.’

‘My name is Corbett. The Evening Voice. We’re all very admiring of your brother’s novel, here. Perhaps you can tell me why he describes it as “nearly a novel”? It’s an unusual vision for a young man to conjure up, wouldn’t you say? Especially for the son of Lord Lovell? A future Defender of His Majesty, as it were? Of course, if it is fiction, but an imagination so strong …’

‘I can’t comment,’ Amy said coldly. ‘You would have to talk to my brother in person. Good afternoon.’ She hung up sharply, and then sat staring at the telephone, fighting the feeling of being invaded. So that was what Richard had meant by seedy fellows reading the laundry lists. She could only hope for Gerald’s sake that the lists weren’t too revealing.

The library door opened and Richard himself peered round it. ‘Ah-ha. Mama told me you were lurking down here. Was that one of the vultures?’

‘Yes. A horrible, insinuating man.’

‘Dear me, how they love a whiff of corruption in high places. “Peer’s Son charged with Immoral Behaviour”. They are positively fainting with delight at the prospect.’

‘Will it come to that?’ Amy asked in alarm.

‘Of course not. I’m far too circumspect.’

‘Your book isn’t circumspect.’

‘It’s fiction, darling. And it isn’t, technically, obscene either. What did you think of it?’

Looking at him as she framed her answer, Amy saw that her brother looked, oddly, more substantial, as if his overnight success suited him. And she also saw that he was anxious. He didn’t write to please, clearly, but he wanted approval. From her, at least.

‘I thought it was impressive,’ she said carefully. ‘Scabrous, but impressive …’

‘So kind,’ he trilled at her, covering his pleasure with flippancy, as always.

‘… and it will hurt Papa terribly.’

Richard’s face stiffened. ‘Our father has never thought about me,’ he said, ‘from the moment it sank through his hide that I couldn’t be Airlie all over again. I can’t adjust my life to please him, Amy. Truly I can’t.’

‘I suppose not,’ she said sadly.

Dismissing the thought, Richard put his arm through hers. ‘Come on. Let’s have some tea and I’ll tell all. I meant the book when I wrote it, deeply heartfelt and all that, of course. But it’s been the most wonderful tease since it came out. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Nervous, respectful reviews here, trying to convey the book’s essence without mentioning the dread word buggery. Darling, I’m so glad you’re a nurse and know all these things, tending those poor sailors down at Lambeth. It makes you so much easier to talk to.’

‘You’re thinking of Greenwich,’ Amy protested.

‘No, I’m not. I know my sailors. Anyway, po-faced rejections there saying it’s not a book they could review in a family publication. The literary crowd in two camps – no, don’t laugh – and every party one goes to divided right down the middle between people queuing to shake hands and people who can’t snub one fast enough. Who would have thought anyone cared? Imploring letters from old queens and violent threats from purple brigadiers pouring into Randle & Cates by every post. Tony’s been such a tower, the dear boy.’

‘What’s Tony’s reaction to all this?’ Amy asked, laughing in spite of herself.

‘Unbridled delight. It’s all shillings in the coffers, after all.’

As he always managed to do, Richard disarmed her. There was no point in judging or moralizing, because Richard was his own law.

He insisted on taking her out to dinner at the Ritz.

‘I’ve got lots of cash. Do let’s spend.’

He commanded, and got, the best table. ‘See?’ he crowed. ‘Word has even spread here. They know I shall be filthily rich on the proceeds of my writings and they’re looking to the ten bobs of the future.’ He was already mildly drunk, and Amy knew from experience that it would be a long, bibulous evening. She settled back in her seat, prepared to be her brother’s audience of one.

‘I shall be rich, of course,’ he assured her.

‘And what will you do with all this wealth?’

‘Oh, stay around here for a little while. People keep asking me to do things. Reviews, articles, that kind of thing. Do you know, I met a dear little choreographer the other night who wants to turn it all into a ballet? Can’t you see it, all black and silver leotards and very, very stark lighting? And then, if things are a little warm here and I detect suspicious men watching me, then I might go to Paris for a little while, or even Berlin.’

Amy frowned at him. ‘Berlin? Would you really want to go there?’

‘How political you are. Other things go on in Berlin, darling, as well as Herr Hitler.’

‘Oh, of course.’

Richard filled her glass to the brim, although she had barely taken two sips from it. ‘And you, my sister?’

‘I shall stay here for a day or two. And then go back to Chance. To … be with Gerald, for a while, until your little cloud has blown over.’

After an evening of Richard’s company, it was easy to find oneself talking like him. He leaned across the table now, suddenly shrewd. ‘Who is he?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t fence. Whoever he is who’s making you look the way you do. As if you can’t quite hear and see what’s going on because something much more important is blocking it out. I remember the feeling. Hasn’t happened much lately.’

‘No one you know,’ Amy said quietly.

Richard put his hands over hers. ‘He’s very lucky, whoever he is.’

Later, Tony Hardy came across the room to join them. Richard was clearly expecting him. He jumped up at once and put his arm round his shoulders.

‘It’s fair that Tony should celebrate with us, don’t you think?’

Even Tony looked a little sleeker. His shapeless evening clothes were at least well brushed, and his thin, quizzical face seemed to have filled out. Amy had a renewed sense of time passing, and leaving her.

Tony kissed her. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I can see that it’s a good enough book for you to have to publish it. Whether Richard should have written it in the first place is a different matter.’

‘Dearest, don’t start all over again. Another bottle, I think?’

Later, they went on to a nightclub. It was a far less grand establishment than Ondine’s, and Richard and Tony seemed to be habitués. As soon as Richard came in he was surrounded by an admiring knot of people.

‘The literary lion!’

‘Darling, I must paint you. Say yes, won’t you?’

Leaving him to it, Tony led Amy on to the dance floor. Peering through the gloom, she saw that more than half the couples were men dancing together. The enclosed space was a forest of feathers and sequins and glitter. Reading Amy’s expression, Tony murmured, ‘Well, I suppose it is rather louche. Do you mind?’

‘I’m flattered you should think me sufficiently one of the boys to bring me here.’

He laughed and hugged her. ‘I bring Angel Mack, sometimes. She always pretends to despise it, but she dresses to the nines and has the time of her life.’

Amy rested her head on Tony’s shoulder as they went on dancing. If it weren’t for Tony Hardy, she would never have gone to Appleyard Street.

And so would never have known Nick.

The fragility of chances stretched backwards, and onwards. Don’t miss the chance of happiness, however fragile, Amy knew instinctively. And the thought of Nick made her throat tighten. She lost the rhythm of her step and stumbled against Tony. He steadied her and they stood still for a moment in the crowd. Tony stared straight into her face.

‘You look different,’ he said.

‘So people keep telling me.’

‘Or no, not exactly different. As if you’re certain of something.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘That’s it exactly. I am certain, at last.’

She stayed at Bruton Street for another three days. She fielded the telephone calls for Richard, growing adept at evasion. She lunched and shopped with Adeline, and went for fittings for clothes she didn’t need. Adeline’s tame expert did her hair, and she had tea with Violet Trent, now married, and dinner with one of Johnny Guild’s old set. She went to The Marriage of Figaro and a charity dance. She did everything calmly, watching herself parade through the days, and every moment she thought of Nick.

She knew, with certainty, that she wouldn’t be coming back to any of this. Whatever might happen to them together he was already powerful enough to have stopped it all for her.

She said a measured goodbye, and then she went back to Chance.

*

There was the familiar single taxicab waiting in the hope of a fare at the station. Amy had known the driver for years, and he tipped his hat to her.

‘‘Afternoon, Miss Lovell. Up to the House, is it? A fine day for coming home.’

Coming home, she echoed in her head.

The park was midsummer green, patched with the shade of the old trees. Amy looked towards the dark fringe of woodland on the north side. The cottage was hidden in its remote hollow.

She paid the driver and walked into the cool of the hallway. One of Gerald’s spaniels flopped down from a chair and came to be fussed over. Amy rubbed the silky ears. ‘Where is he, boy? Show me.’ With a flurry of its tail the dog bustled away, its toenails clicking faintly on the oak boards.

Amy found her father in the gun room. He was sitting with his back to the door amidst the dead season’s clutter. He had been re-reading the old game books from before the War.

He put his hand out to the spaniel before acknowledging Amy.

‘Down, Pollux.’ When at last he did glance up at her it was clear that he knew. The change in him was startling. The vertical furrows were pulled deeper in his cheeks and the corners of his mouth turned down with a new bitterness. Worse than that was Gerald’s bewilderment. He had aged ten years, and to Amy he looked on the verge of senility. His hand grasping the leather arm of his chair was shaking.

Amy went quickly and knelt beside the chair.

‘Daddy …’ she began, and he turned to stare at her. The old, piercing look that threatened explosions had turned milky and unfocused, and it frightened her far more.

‘Daddy, he …’

Gerald might not have heard her. ‘So. I hear my son’s a bugger,’ he said. Even his voice had aged. It was thinner, without its old resonance.

‘Have you read the book?’ she asked gently.

The violence of the shaky hand’s gesture made Amy start backwards.

‘I don’t want to read that sort of filth. Hearing about it was enough.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Morton.’

Of course, it would be Morton. He was her father’s country solicitor, a malicious and small-minded little man whom Richard had often cruelly mimicked. Morton would consider it his duty to inform his lordship of what was being vulgarly bruited abroad. Amy could hear the very pompousness of his words and his measured, judgemental cadences. Gerald could hardly have received the news more damagingly.

‘I have read it. Only since I’ve been away. I didn’t know anything about it before. It’s a good book, Papa. It’s very sad, and honest. Richard shouldn’t have done it, for your sake, but for himself I think it was brave. I don’t think he chose to be the way he is. It can’t be … particularly happy for him.’

Gerald’s taut mouth showed his disgust.

‘So it’s not Richard’s fault? Of course, it couldn’t be. I suppose you want to say it’s mine? Or your mother’s. Yours and Isabel’s too, perhaps.’

Perhaps, Amy thought. All our faults. Even Airlie’s.

But she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said sadly.

Gerald screwed up a loose sheet of paper and flung it away from him. ‘I don’t want to see him. Never again, never, in my house. If the estate wasn’t entailed on him I’d will it away today. You and Isabel could have it.’ He put his face in his hands, ‘Poor Chance. When I’m gone your brother will fill it with bum boys and dancing niggers and scum. He’ll cut down my trees to pay their bills.’

Even as he spoke, Amy could hear Richard parodying Gerald in the very same words. It was cruel, and cruelly ironic that her father’s vision of a bleak and corrupt modernity was not so far removed from Richard’s own pessimism. The realization stirred sour laughter in Amy.